What are the Courtship & Betrothal Movements?

Where {there} is not already a far deeper unity than marriage can give, marriage itself can do little to bring two souls together – may do much to drive them asunder.

—George MacDonald[1]

"Where do you go to school, and what grade are you in?" It was a question I was frequently asked as a child. It was also a question that I didn't know how to properly answer. Not knowing what else to say, I would usually blurt out, "I, um, I'm home-schooled."

"You're what?"

"I'm home-schooled. I don't go to school, I mean I go to school but it's at home. My mother teaches us."

At that point some people would respond with interest, following it up with perhaps another question. Others would just shrug or whisper to themselves quietly, "I knew there was something weird about that boy."

Those were the days before home schooling became the 'in' thing for American Christians. It rather had the status that tofu did about thirty years ago: something that hadn't come into the limelight of acceptability, but was left for the appreciation of a handful of visionaries.

Now of course things are different. Home schooling has not only become commonplace for thousands of American Christians, but "the home-schooling movement", as it has come to be called, has become a powerful political force. Of recent years the movement has been characterized by people with extremist agendas, often inciting unfair and pejorative generalizations about all home-schoolers.

For some parents, the decision to home-school may be purely in order to give their children a better education. By and large, however, the decision to home-school, at least among Christian parents, usually results from some awareness of the dangers - whether they be spiritual, psychological, emotional or even physical - associated with the public school system. With many parents this may include a sense of danger at the idea of their children having too much independence and autonomy.

Now the desire to control a child's environment is not necessarily either a good or bad thing. A responsible parent can control without being controlling, can regulate the child's influences without being paranoid. But it is a very fine line between these two, a line that can easily become blurred in the motivations of home-schooling parents. In some home-schooling families the independence that normally occurs at adulthood is disallowed and a prolonged or even perpetual state of parental dependence ensues.

Before I go any further let me say that the last thing I am here to do is to criticize home schoolers. Far from it. Just in case anyone gets me wrong on this point, let me say that my wife and I proudly home-school our children. It is as an insider (and a second generation home-schooler to boot) that I am looking at this. But this essay is not about home schooling. It is about another movement which is, so to speak, the child of the home-schooling movement.

As I have watched a generation of home-schoolers grow up along side myself, the response from our parents to this phenomenon - their children reaching maturity - has been instructive. The parents who had been campaigning for home education fifteen and twenty years ago, began to develop ideas to meet the new needs brought about by their children growing up. The concept of home schooling was eclipsed by the concept of ‘home dating’, if you will. Just as these parents had been concerned to protect their children from the harmful influences of the school system, now they were concerned to protect them from the harmful influences associated with the world of romance and dating.

If parents are worried about the effects of school, the solution is simple enough: educate the children at home. But when the same parents become worried about the effects of romance and love upon the lives of their children, what can they do? Can the desire for love and romance be pulled out of a person with the equal simplicity of pulling a child out of school? Or is it possible to modify the conditions of a young man or woman's environment sufficiently so as to minimalize the extent, and eventually control the direction of their love life?

It was to grapple with questions such as these that the idea of courtship first came about. Of course the word itself is nothing new. To some the term may have romantic connotations - something that brings to mind Jane Austin romances. It comes from the days before dating when the custom was for a man to call on a women at her parent's house to 'court.' Then instead of saying that two people were 'going together' or ‘dating’, as we might say now, you would say that they were 'courting.' In the new movement, however, the word courtship carries a different nuance, and it is a misconception to associate it with the customs that surrounded the word a hundred years ago.

Some have been encouraged by the success of the movement to predict that “these new priorities for marriage foundations will become standard within the Church in the next decade.”[2] While this movement is mainly confined to America, people have recently started bringing the ideas over to England through home schooling organizations. Yet while courtship advocacy is on the rise, the amount of critical material devoted to its analysis it has been virtually non-existent. That is one of the main reasons I felt it was so necessary to write this present essay.

So what actually is this thing called courtship? Those who now advocate courtship usually define it in negatives, putting more emphasis on what it is not than on what it actually is. To some extent this is to be expected with any movement that is essentially reactionary. For this reason one cannot truly understand courtship without first understanding the problems for which it is an alternative, and the reasons this alternative is seen as necessary. To express these problems in brevity - and at the risk of sounding trite - they are the breakdown of marriage and of sexual morality in our society.

The advocates of courtship rightly point out that there is a connection between the problems we see in marriage (that is, it's almost predictable tendency to breakdown), and the problems we see in how relationships are approached before marriage. They have criticized the outlook that anything is okay before marriage as long as you stay physically pure. Such a mentality, they point out, can all too easily lead a person to view a relationship as a vehicle for temporary pleasure regardless of commitment. You know the typical pattern: take out whomever you want until one of you grows tired of the relationship and then you switch to another partner. In this pattern, the actual person can become an irrelevance, their only function being to serve the other person's short-term needs and desires.

Marriages are often entered into on this same basis, with no genuine understanding of what true love is all about. Most of the television heroes who are adopted as role models by young children play roles that encourage this wrong approach to relationships.

It would be nice to be able to say that the church has a better track record and has successfully stood against this tide. Unfortunately, the truth is that many churches actually encourage, either actively or passively, the kind of attitude described above. One example of this is Ian Gregory who goes so far as to suggest that sexual attraction should be used to help promote the gospel, since "the anecdotal evidence and logic do point us in this direction that sexual attraction does have a powerful influence on church attendance."[3] It is "ungodly", Gregory says, to "say that the only motivation for coming to church should be a desire to know God."[4]

In his book No Sex Please, We're Single, Gregory encourages Christian singles to play 'the dating game' by taking out as many people as possible, not only because "dating should be a laugh," as he puts it, but because this puts us in a position to know, through comparison, what is truly important for us in the opposite sex. Gregory sees that the number one problem facing the church today is that Christian singles cannot find marriage partners, which he attributes to the fact that "church culture suffers from a dysfunctional dating scene..." Finding a marriage partner, he says, is of even greater importance than Jesus' great commission, and the failure of the church to meet this need accounts for why the divorce rate has increased in the church, and it stands as a hindrance not merely to church growth and life, but to world evangelism as well.

As a solution, Gregory suggests that pastors should "facilitate marriages" and he encourages "Setting up a dating agency or offering arranged marriages..." Gregory himself organizes huge parties "with loud music and good food, and a couple of hundred grooving godly lonely hearts" as one report put it.

Though Gregory's views are not yet mainstream, they serve to illustrate the trend in today's church towards a social atmosphere in which pleasure is given a higher priority than integrity, and where recreational dating and partying are seen as vital to make a church-community attractive to outsiders. The difference between this approach and how relationships in the secular world are treated is merely quantitative rather than qualitative, in so far as in the church sex is taboo before marriage. Though even this aspect, once a bedrock of Christian ethics, is now being challenged. For example, consider the words of Gareth Sturdy, editor of one of England's leading Christian magazines, who writes that

The church community that is concerned with purity will produce 'pollutants' and 'would-be-saviours'. That community then becomes highly self-centred and censorious, breeding introversion and smugness. This is not the church that transforms and remodels society.[5]

In other words, for a church to attract unbelievers it must not be ‘concerned with purity’, for that might turn people off the gospel!

The situation I have been describing is, though cause of much alarm, not the primary concern of this essay. Rather, I wish to examine an ideology that has risen in reaction to it. It is not surprising that many in the church are ready for something different, some new method that is as far removed as possible from present trends. The declining state of our society as regards marriage is therefore used as justification for new measures and methods in the selection of spouses and prevention of divorce. This brings us back to the new courtship movement.

Expressed ideologically, the thesis of courtship is seen as the antithesis of dating. It attempts to avoid the pitfalls, not only of premarital infidelity, but also of temptation. It further seeks to eliminate what is seen as an undesirable waste product of love and romance, namely, the potential for broken-hearts. Young people are encouraged to 'die' to their desire to experience a romantic relationship, thus making the most out of their years of singleness rather than rushing around looking for boyfriends or girlfriends. A more holistic view of purity is stressed - one that encompasses not only physical purity but purity of the emotions and mind as well, thus minimalizing the temptations of which physical unchastity is often the result.

Expressed in more practical terms, courtship is a parentally supervised relationship with the opposite sex that is a preparation for marriage. Though the interaction usually occurs in an overseen or semi-supervised family environment, variations can include everything from an arranged marriage to simply pursuing a relationship with the parents’ consent. Above all, it attempts to bypass the dangers of the modern dating system through some form of parental involvement. Usually this includes the idea that a relationship must be entered into only after marriage is either already expected or a definite possibility. It is conducted with the understanding that the father has power throughout to give the green light or red. The courtship serves as a kind of testing ground for the father to see if this person is really right for his child.

How is it that young people, having reached the age of independence, are happy to be dictated to? To answer this it must be stressed that ideas can only work in the context of a family where a strong sense of control has been fostered, and where the individuality and independence which usually develops has been stifled at every turn. Such a backdrop is absolutely essential for the operation of ‘courtship’.

It would take a whole book in itself just to relate the different ideas of how courtship should be done. In every home-schooling conference, book sale, catalogue or magazine, you'll find a slightly different slant on the whole thing, though with some common universals running through all of them. (The exception to this is Douglas Wilson’s teaching on Christian courtship/dating. He does not seem to be tainted by the same tendencies and damaging assumptions we will be considering in this series of essays.)

Courtship originally owes its popularity to Bill Gothard. According to Gothard, “Courtship is a father's agreeing to work with a qualified young man to win his daughter for marriage."[6] Jonathan Lindvall defines courtship as "a relationship between a guy and a girl that both of them understand the purpose to be, to seriously look to a permanent relationship. That they are very serious about the expectation or hope of getting married."[7] This expectation, Lindvall argues, is on the basis of the parents discerning God's will before there is any kind of romantic relationship, and in some cases before there is any relationship at all. When romance does occur, it is what he calls “authorized romance.” Lindvall writes about his own experience as an example of this, which I quote at length as a good example of the courtship method -

I wanted to marry a wonderful Christian young lady my parents liked, but didn't feel was God's choice for me. Thankfully I purposed not to even discuss marriage with her without their full blessing... After repeated unsuccessful attempts to persuade my parents that I knew God's will, I finally committed myself to die to the vision I was sure was of God.... My father, particularly, hinted that I should pray about marrying Connie. After initially resisting the suggestion, I agreed to pray about it. In time the Lord showed me I was to marry Connie.

"Although I was not yet 'in love' with her (regrettably I had allowed my emotions to focus on the first girl), with my parents' encouragement I sought and acquired Connie's parents' blessing to marry her. All this took place before I had much emotional attachment to Connie, and certainly before she was at all interested in me. When, with her parents' blessing, I proposed to her she had absolutely no idea I was even interested in her. Neither of us were "in love" with the other. In time Connie concluded that I was God's will for her. It was during our engagement period that we actually 'fell in love' with one another.[8]

Elsewhere Lindvall explains about the process of struggle he had to go through to marry Connie against his inclination. He prayed, saying,

"'Lord, I really want your will. If Connie's the one you want me to marry, I'll make the sacrifice, I'll marry her.... Oh, Lord, I surrender my will.' The Lord started speaking to me that, yes indeed, Connie was the one I was supposed to marry. 'Oh, Lord, really, do I have to?' 'Yes, yes, you have to.' 'Oh Lord, okay.' So I went to my dad and said, "God has shown me I'm supposed to marry Connie.'... It took four months for God to get through to Connie. But finally she saw the light."[9]

Lindvall tells the story of another young man who, desiring to 'court' a certain woman, went and first obtained her father's permission to marry her before they had ever had anything to do with each other. "Essentially he was proposing to the father..." says Lindvall, "before they had ever gone out, before, you know, any social interaction between the young lady and himself."[10]

Obviously love does not fit into this package. In fact, that is the whole point. If one can be in control of one’s emotions to the degree that love and romance follow clearly orchestrated pre-arranged dictates, then there is less chance of the temptations or emotional pain that are always a potential of a more natural lifestyle. Hence, these teachers consistently oppose such ideas as 'falling in love' and 'finding the right person.'[11] Jonathan Lindvall is typical when he says that God

never intended for people to marry simply because they love each other. Love is not the basis for marriage. Love should proceed from the commitment to marriage. The Bible doesn't say, 'Marry the one you love.' It says, 'Love the one you marry.' And there's a vast difference between the two. Today people marry because they love each other.[12]

Any man and woman, if they are mature enough, can practice agape love (that is, love that is an act of the will), but is this all that is needed for a good - and therefore happy - marriage? If so, then it does not matter who you marry as long as the person practices agape love.

In recent years Lindvall has developed his views, becoming more extreme. He is now arguing that courtship has unscriptural flaws because it does not go far enough, since there is still the opportunity for either person to back out if they find they are not emotionally compatible. This Lindvall suggests sounds "vaguely similar to the rationale for a couple living together for a time before marriage - to find out if they are compatible...”[13] Instead he suggests 'betrothal' which is essentially an arranged marriage in which not only the man and the woman but both sets of parents have veto power. In the next section of this essay I would like to explore in more detail this teaching called betrothal.

This Business of Betrothal

Courtship has been in vogue for many years. Many people have practiced it, with a variety of results. Some of the advocates of courtship have felt disappointed that courtship has failed to offer the solution they had originally hoped. Since some people have 'courted' multiple individuals in succession before landing on one that the parents were happy with, those who saw courtship as a means to ensure that romance only occurred with one person, were disillusioned.

The result of such disillusionment has been that some advocates of courtship have abandoned the idea for the stricter and more consistent theory of betrothal, urging other Christians “to discard experimental ‘courtship’ as an ideal, in favor of the scriptural model of irrevocable betrothal.”[14]

At the moment, betrothal is the newest thing on the rise, and though it is more consistent and airtight than courtship, it is also more disastrous.

There are many horror stories about people who are being burnt by the betrothal system. There have been young men who have sought to marry a girl, submitted to the system, only to fail in the end at passing through the tricky betrothal obstacle course. Other testimonies speak of how often a daughter is totally surprised at her father's choice for her husband. There are young men who have been home-schooled, have very high standards and would normally be attracted to the sorts of women whose families do betrothal, yet are scared off by the whole process. They consciously avoid any girl whose family professes betrothal since they feel they must court that woman's father rather than the women herself, and must make a commitment before they know what they are committing to.

So what exactly is betrothal and how does it differ from courtship? I'd like to answer that question by examining the teachings of the main proponent of betrothal, Jonathan Lindvall.[15]

False Dilemma

Lindvall's views about love and romance are very similar to those we find in Best Friends For Life, although he reaches his conclusions through quite a different route. Typically, he always begins his sessions by attacking the mentality that thinks, ‘Let’s date just for the fun of it and when we get tired of each other we can just move on to somebody else.’ Lindvall then portrays scenarios where recreational dating is practiced in a way that any mature Christian would find objectionable, and then juxtaposes this with his method. Likewise, he describes a ‘love’ that is based merely on lust and then juxtaposes this with his idea of betrothal. Thus, he reaches his conclusion through another use of false dilemmas. When he makes out that these are the only options from which we must choose, we are hardly left with much of a choice! By employing these false dilemmas, along with an emotional appeal to high standards, Lindvall is able to target that segment of young Christians who most sincerely desire God's will but are unable to recognize the logical fallacies inherent in his reasoning. Those who have responded in disagreement to Lindvall's ideas (including myself) receive exhortations from him to commit themselves wholly to pleasing God rather than man[16], as if it is inconceivable that anyone whole-heatedly committed to Christ would hold any other viewpoint!

Love is not the Foundation

As an alternative, Lindvall proposes betrothal. The definition of betrothal is best left to Lindvall’s own words. He writes,

In the Biblical model of ‘betrothal’, the decision to marry is made based on God’s will, confirmed by parents and other authorities, rather than emotional and hormonal impulses. The betrothal period is provided for the emotions to catch up to the irrevocable decision made prayerfully and rationally. Our emotions are not to lead us, but to follow us.[17]

Notice here how Lindvall makes the alternative to betrothal one in which the marriage is based solely on emotional and hormonal impulses. The idea of marriage being based on love is not worthy for Lindvall to even mention as an option here! Elsewhere Lindvall does address this to say (speaking of his marriage),

Our marriage is not based on love, our marriage is based on the will of God, and the love followed the decision to surrender to God's will.[18]

We have an either/or situation here as prayer, spiritual submission and rationality are contrasted to emotionally felt love. The idea that prayerful submission to God’s will is opposed to emotionally felt love is simply assumed.

Elsewhere Lindvall likens love occurring as an act of the will to the act of the will involved in praising the Lord and choosing to be joyful whether we feel like it or not. When we make that choice the emotions will follow, for "God's intent is that emotions would follow the will...that the will would dictate to the emotions."[19] He quotes Colossians 3:13 ("Put on love") and says, "Put your will in gear and say, 'I WILL love.'...Love is an act of my will to put someone else first."[20]

But hold on. If Lindvall believes that the definition of love is a volitional commitment, and that such a commitment must form the foundation for marriage, then what of his statement elsewhere that "Love is not to be the foundation of marriage"[21]? Part of the problem is that Lindvall frequently uses inconsistent definitions of love interchangeably, depending on which conclusion he is arguing for at the time and depending on which scripture he is trying to force into his definitions.

Bailing Out Mode

But let us continue with Lindvall’s argument. He suggests that when a person experiences a series of temporary romances, the breaking up process that is necessarily involved develops bad habit patterns. “Though ‘breaking up is hard to do’”, he writes, “the more you do it the easier it gets. This is more accurately preparation for divorce than for marriage.”[22] Wayne has argued similarly:

After a while, a deep-rooted pattern of leaping out of relationships is developed. Once such a person is married, if things don’t go their way in the relationship, they revert to default mode: bail out![23]

Is this true? It depends. If the reason a person moves through a series of boyfriends or girlfriends is because of a fundamentally wrong approach to relationships – whether it be they are flirtatious, or seeking the thrill of short-term intimacy rather than the potential of marriage, or unwilling to stick it out through the difficult as well as the positive aspects of a relationship - then of course these wrong attitudes, like any wrong attitude, are going to become easier the longer they are practiced. However, consider the case of a woman I know whose approach to relationships was very conscientious and prayerful, but who, through a combination of misfortunes and honest mistakes, went through three boyfriends plus one broken engagement before she found the man she finally married. This women did not create for herself ‘a deep-rooted pattern of leaping out of relationships’, nor did it become gradually easier for her to break up the more she did it In fact, the opposite was true: the more this woman broke up with various boyfriends, the more desirous she became to find a relationship that would be permanent. It is nonsense to suggest that now she is married she must find it more difficult to remain with her husband because she had a series of short-term relationships before marrying him.

Based on the construction of this false problem, Lindvall is able to argue that we need an alternative method for conducting relationships. At first he taught that the solution to dating was courtship. Now, however, Lindvall has concluded that courtship has unscriptural flaws because "it does not go far enough".[24] This is because there is still the opportunity for either person to bail out if they find they are not emotionally compatible, which Lindvall suggests sounds "vaguely similar to the rationale for a couple living together for a time before marriage - to find out if they are compatible…’[25] Thus, according to Lindvall, the whole idea of courtship being a 'testing ground' is flawed.

Lindvall concludes that the only answer is what he calls betrothal. This includes a complete prohibition on all personal friendships with the opposite sex prior to the betrothal period. If breaking up during a romantic relationship will really lead to all the damaging consequences that Lindvall suggests, then we need to be sure that our children don't fall in love or experience any romantic emotions or thoughts prior to knowing with absolute certainty who they will marry. Once the match is determined, it needs then to be impossible for either party to back out. To fully understand why Lindvall believes this is necessary, let’s have a look at his teaching about the pre-betrothal period in which romantic emotions and thoughts are disallowed.

Retroactive Marriage

It is here that Lindvall postulates a rather convoluted argument that I have taken the liberty of naming 'the theory of retroactive matrimony'. This idea implies that marriage works backwards, so that behavior that would be inappropriate for Lindvall's wife to exhibit towards other men (i.e.. going out with them, having a romantic relationship. etc.), would be equally wrong before she ever married Lindvall. He maintains that whether a person is actually already married or actually single is irrelevant to the fact that it is wrong to have romantic emotions towards them, unless you know for sure that this person will one day be your spouse. Thus, to an imaginary young man going out on a date, Jonathan says

So tonight you're taking out a girl that probably will not be your wife, and in fact, someday she'll probably be someone else's wife. So you're taking out somebody else's wife tonight....[26]

That’s a very big leap! Just because a woman might someday be someone else's wife does not mean that to take her out is the same as taking out somebody else's wife, for the very obvious reason that the marriage has not yet occurred!

In the Old Testament the sin of adultery was considered more serious than that of fornication, and incurred a greater penalty.[27] The reason for this was surely that adultery is a transgression against an existing marriage covenant, one that did not exist until it was ratified. (In a following essay we shall discuss in more detail Old Testament marriage customs.) Yet Lindvall implies that the commitment to the marriage covenant extends, not only into the future, but retroactively into the past as well. Thus Lindvall argues that the same standards, which apply to relationships among married people, apply equally to relationships among unmarried young people. He says,

I am convinced if there is something that is inappropriate for me to do with a woman I'm not married to, it is also inappropriate for my son to do this with a woman he is not married to.[28]

Somehow we have been brainwashed into thinking that we can have one standard for married people and another standard for single people.... We've got a double standard here.[29]

If consistently applied, this idea of 'retroactive marriage' would give rise to all sorts of absurd and unnatural situations. One of these is the suggestion by Lindvall that Paul's words in 1 Tim. 3:12 and Tit. 1:6 that a church leader should be literally a "one-woman man" might be referring to premarital emotions as well.[30] In other words, if you have experienced romantic emotions for more than one person in your life, Lindvall questions whether you should be allowed to be a church leader!

Your Emotions Belong to Dad!

Lindvall carries his theory to its consistent conclusion: no young person should have any romantic feelings for anyone until they are engaged to their future spouse. This brings us back to the concept of ‘emotional purity’ which we shall explore in a future essay. “There's a time for romance,” writes Lindvall, “but it's not before their decision, it's after the decision has been made.[31] Essentially, Lindvall says to his children, “Do not stir up nor awaken love until the father so desires” - to make a variant of Song of Songs 2:7.

Just as we teach our young people to reserve themselves physically for marriage, I believe the scriptures call us to train them to reserve their romantic emotions for the betrothal period immediately preceding marriage, having enjoyed the benefit of God-ordained protectors (parents) in helping them seek and find His will for their lifelong companion.[32]

Part of Lindvall's motivation for doing this with his children is that he and his wife "bear deep regrets" from the fact that they each had romantic relationships with others before they married each other. Even now, though he is in his fifties, Jonathan says,

I sometimes ponder wistfully what a wonderful thing it would be if I were the first man she had knitted her heart with. She wishes the same about me, but with pain I recognize that I didn't save my heart for her. It is my intention to spare my own children the regrets I bear.[33]

Building on the fact of his particular deep regrets, Lindvall suggests generally that no young man would want the woman he will one day marry to be dated by another man or to have romantic feelings for anyone else other than himself. Consequently in keeping to the Golden Rule of doing to others as we would have them do to us (Mt. 7:12), he thinks we ought to restrain any romantic feelings until we know for certain who we will marry. A woman, he says, is the property of her future husband, and therefore we should think in terms of property and ownership when it comes to romantic relationships. When a woman is 'given in marriage' by the father to the groom, this symbolizes a transfer of ownership. But to have a romance with a woman before her ownership has been formally transferred, is for that man to "defraud his brother" (1 Thess. 4:6) since he is stealing something that properly belongs only to the woman's future husband. "God intends for them to marry," says Lindvall, “but God wants them to experience authorized romance. Authorization, not only for the physical but for the emotional ownership of one another.”[34]

It’s Up to God to Make It Work!

So when does this authorization for emotional ownership occur? Well, first of all, God reveals who the son or daughter is supposed to marry. How does He reveal this? You guessed it - He reveals it to the parents. As Lindvall writes,

As we go through the right way, I think there are enough safeguards that we can be pretty sure that you're not going to get the wrong person if you do it the right way. How are we going to know it's the right person? God will speak, and God has revealed in His word that He speaks through authorities in all of our lives.[35]

...the decision of whom to marry is based entirely on God's will confirmed by our authorities, with a confidence that God would bring romance to us as a blessing of our obedience…[36]

...God wants young people to honor their parents...by voluntarily submitting their choice of a marriage partner to them.[37]

What seems most unbelievable is that Lindvall extends these ideas to situations where the parents are unbelievers, ungodly or antagonistic to the very betrothal system. Lindvall leaves no doubt on the matter - no matter how ungodly one or both sets of parents may be, you must not marry without their consent.

We see from the above quotations that the entire system hinges on the assumption that God is going to make it work. I have observed earlier how unhealthy it is for parents to straight-jacket young people into the one-and-only-way for getting married. The question might now be considered from the Lord’s point of view. I wonder how God feels when told that He has to work within the confines of this system – that the whole plan hinges on His cooperation. Somehow, I don’t think the Lord is very amused.

Despite the emphasis placed on God’s participation, His exact function in the betrothal system remains ambiguous. Lindvall says that the young person can say, "It's in God's hands, God's speaking to my parents, and I'm just resting."[38] When I was a boy and discussed this issue with Lindvall I happened to refer to "the father choosing" who his offspring would marry, whereupon Lindvall corrected me. "No," he said, "it's not the father who chooses. It's God who chooses. God reveals His will to the father." This being the case, it seems rather erroneous for Lindvall to go through long lists of criteria for helping parents to decide, analyzing the conditions each of the four parents must keep in mind when making the decision, and presenting dozens of safeguards and prerequisites along the way as a sort of insurance policy. This would seem to imply that it is not so much a matter of Divine revelation as analytical deliberation on the part of the parents. Furthermore, the idea that if any of the six people involved (i.e. both sets of parents, both young people) choose to veto it, the marriage can't happen, hardly seems consistent with the supposition that God has mandated the match through a special revelation to the father. Yet Lindvall wants it both ways: in order to persuade the young person Lindvall wants to be able to have the father say that God has spoken to him regarding the rightness of the match, but in order to preserve his idea of an authority structure, he wants to also have the subsequent possibility of the match not being of God if one of the six people choose to veto it. As he says

It would seem to me that any one of the parties involved, either of the mothers, either of the fathers, and either of the young people has a possibility of vetoing the whole thing and everything is off at that point.[39]

Remember, this is before the young people are allowed to have any feelings for each other.

Veto Power: a Generous Concession?

Typically if one suggests that this scheme involves forcing unwilling marriages upon people, advocates will point out that this is not the case because of the veto-power with which the son and daughter are invested. However, if some reflection is given to this idea of veto power, I believe we will see that it is, in fact, one of the biggest jokes in the whole system.

One has to remember that in order for the betrothal system to work in the first place, in order for it to even make sense to the young people involved, they must have grown up under conditions that most people would consider quite abnormal. In short, these are not people who have been encouraged to develop a sense of their own independent personhood, but have been taught, from a very early age, to accept their parents’ judgment on everything. The anecdotal evidence from people who have escaped from such families usually always presents the same picture: a person who finds independent thinking scary and who, in many important respects, cannot even function as an individual. So it sounds good in theory to say that such a person has the ability to veto their parents’ choice of a mate, but if they have been trained never to disagree with Mom and Dad, if they have been told that God does not speak to them directly but only through their parents, if they have been taught that they must obey their parents in everything even as adults, and if their own independence has never been encouraged, then to tell them that the parents have given them permission to veto the person their parents have chosen (a choice which, we are told, is based on a direct revelation from God!), is not going to amount to very much. It is hardly the generous concession that it seems.

Someone I know who grew up under this system had some very insightful observations to make about this, so called, ‘veto power.’ Looking back over her own experience, she pointed out that we must

take into account that these young people have never had any kind of close bond with anyone outside their family, and have never even had same-sex friends that weren't family friends. All their social interactions were in the context of their own family, and they were expected to have their only really close friends within the family (parents and siblings). So they don't know what really connecting with someone or having a healthy relationship with the potential of deep emotional intimacy looks like. If their parents don't have an exceptionally good marriage, they haven't seen what real connection, love, and respect looks like, or how a man and woman who deeply love and respect each other treat one another.

Since these young people have heard all their lives that love is not a necessary prerequisite for marriage, and that married love is really no different from "brotherly love" or the love all Christians should have for each other, they really see no necessity for any connection beyond that of faith, similar convictions, and liking each other reasonably well. So it would make no sense for a young person to reject the first person that comes along that their parents like, as long as that person is godly, has the correct views and character traits, and seems nice enough. That's really all that's considered necessary.

I have been told of one occasion where a father did not agree with his daughter about the man she wished to marry. So she decided to do the ‘right’ thing and submit to her father’s choice. She met her future husband twice before the wedding. At the wedding she sang a song in which the recurring refrain was, “Daddy, you’re the only man in my heart.” Sad as this is, it is perhaps sadder that such examples are held up as role models.

Keep the Woman In The Dark

I have suggested that the young person’s ability to veto the proposed match is not the generous concession that it seems. This becomes even more evident when we consider the fact that the young lady, according to Lindvall and many other advocates of betrothal, should not even be informed that the match is under consideration until it has passed all the other five people, otherwise she might accidentally release her emotions towards him prematurely and end up being defrauded if the man doesn't "pass inspection." Therefore, she "should be the last one to know unless God sovereignty speaks to her first"[40], for as Israel Wayne puts it,

If she knows that this man desires to marry her, she will almost inevitably give her heart to him (assuming he is a decent man). This would be dangerous if the young man fails to follow through with the needed preparation.[41]

Once the Betrothal Begins

If the young lady says yes, then the betrothal starts and "the young couple can begin to safely release their emotions to each other."[42] At that point "this is an irrevocable commitment"[43] that Lindvall suggests is initiated by presenting it to the congregation. The congregation is then required to hold the young people responsible for a number of things, such as staying morally pure, not touching each other, not spending time alone together and

Another thing that we would ask the congregation to hold them accountable to is cultivating that emotional bond, that during this period even though, you know, they're saying, 'Hey, we know that God wants us to get married, we're not in love with each other and so we're asking the congregation to pray for us, to reinforce us, to push us together emotionally, to cultivate that romance so that we will, in fact, be in love, deeply in love, before we marry.'[44]

God wants our young people to experience a 'no risk' commitment.... God's design is that we would encourage them to fall in love only after the commitment is made.[45]

Because of a basic confusion about the meaning of various kinds of love, together with an unrealistic view of human nature, Lindvall assumes that falling in love is something a person can just decide to manufacture - that two people can choose not to fall in love until God's will has been revealed, and then as an act of the will, magically decide that now they are going to fall in love. As Wayne puts it, "if you determine to love someone, the emotions follow."[46] Human beings are thus treated like robots controlled by gadgets and buttons. But there is no button on human beings that can be pressed to make one person truly love someone that they do not.

Be that as it may, however, I still hear cases of this method apparently 'working’ where betrothed couples fall in love and then have a good marriage as a result of following this procedure. But we must define what we mean by a 'good' marriage. As we have seen earlier, often the presence of agape love is all that people think is needed for a 'good' marriage? But according to the New Testament we should practice agape love to our enemies, so if the presence of agape is all that is needed to make a marriage ‘good’, then in theory a man and wife could be enemies and still have a ‘good’ marriage. Such a definition of a good marriage reduces language to a meaningless game.

As for there being empirical evidence that people have chosen to fall in love during the betrothal period, I have no doubt that if a young man and woman have been subjected to the above circumstances, have been raised without a proper understanding of love, and are expecting to fall in love after betrothal, and they know that they will eventually have sex, obviously - the human chemistry being what it is – some emotions are going to click in eventually. But here it is essential to ask whether those emotions proceed from an intrinsic oneness and compatibility of the two people, or whether the emotions proceed from extrinsic conditions and would, therefore, have been equally apparent if another man or woman had been chosen. Whether these emotions can meaningfully be called love would depend on one’s understanding of love.

But getting back to Lindvall's argument. He suggests that the betrothal period differs from the normal idea of engagement in that, while one may break an engagement, a betrothal is irrevocable. Although the betrothal is not legally binding, and although consummation has not occurred, nevertheless we should think of it just as binding as a regular marriage. That is the sense in which it is a 'no risk' commitment, because there is not the risk that you will 'defraud' your future spouse through experiencing emotions towards another person or through bailing out in the middle of engagement. Your chance of backing out is gone. During this period, the young people are authorized to fall in love, and indeed, are required to do so, despite the fact that they must constantly be chaperoned.

In his taped lecture "Scriptural Betrothal" Lindvall gives suggestions, based ostensibly on Biblical patterns, for the betrothal period and wedding. Lindvall does say that these are only suggestions for us to think about. Though he hopes his children will take the following suggestions, he does not advocate them with the same dogmatic adherence as he does the basic principles of betrothal.

One such suggestion is that the parents decide the date of the wedding without telling the two young people. This enables the parents to wait until they feel the young people are ready and then arrange the wedding sort of like a surprise birthday party. (The comparison to a surprise birthday party originates with Lindvall, not me.) To support this idea Lindvall appeals to Christ's words that "not even the Son knows the day nor the hour, only your Father who is in heaven"[47] which he says is a reference to Jewish marriage customs.[48]

Another suggestion is that the wedding happen at the parents’ house, and that the service is officiated by the father. Regarding sexual instruction, Lindvall suggests it is best for this to occur on the day or a few days before the wedding. Regarding the honeymoon, Lindvall asks "What is the scriptural precedent? Going to the groom's house - going to their home."[49] Lindvall says that hopefully during the betrothal period the man will have been making or preparing a home he can take his wife to.

The reason Lindvall believes this latter suggestion – and, no doubt, some of the others - has 'scriptural precedent' is because it was practiced in the Jewish culture at the time the Bible was written. As this is the same ground from which Lindvall argues for the scripturicity of betrothal, we must consider whether the argument holds. In short three questions must be asked. One, does scripture give any indication that the traditions of Judaism are accompanied with a divine endorsement? Two, is betrothal, as Lindvall defines it, actually an ancient Jewish practice? Thirdly, and most fundamentally, is betrothal Biblical? These are the questions I would like to explore in a future essay.

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